As Java 9 has been released few days ago, I went through the [What's New](https://docs.oracle.com/javase/9/whatsnew/toc.htm) to see if there is something useful in the context of Competitive Programming. And I didn't find much, just these 2 enhancements:↵
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- new static factory methods on the List, Set, and Map interfaces (returning immutable instances of those collections), for example: `Set<String> alphabet = Set.of("a", "b", "c");`↵
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- internal String representation as array of bytes (8 bit) instead of array of chars (16 bit) in case the string contains only Latin-1 characters (which is normally the case in Competitive Programming); this would reduce memory consumption almost by half in String problems, and I wonder what would be the impact on performance.↵
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As a personal note, I feel like Java is still light years behind Scala (which unfortunately is broken on CF for 2 months already) for writing CP code, even though both of them run on the same JVM. Just please, don't start language flame wars, unless you have tried both :)↵
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P. S. If someone goes through "What's new" of Java 9 and notices some more relevant enhancements, please post them here. I could have missed something.
↵
- new static factory methods on the List, Set, and Map interfaces (returning immutable instances of those collections), for example: `Set<String> alphabet = Set.of("a", "b", "c");`↵
↵
- internal String representation as array of bytes (8 bit) instead of array of chars (16 bit) in case the string contains only Latin-1 characters (which is normally the case in Competitive Programming); this would reduce memory consumption almost by half in String problems, and I wonder what would be the impact on performance.↵
↵
As a personal note, I feel like Java is still light years behind Scala (which unfortunately is broken on CF for 2 months already) for writing CP code, even though both of them run on the same JVM. Just please, don't start language flame wars, unless you have tried both :)↵
↵
P. S. If someone goes through "What's new" of Java 9 and notices some more relevant enhancements, please post them here. I could have missed something.
